Chapter 20, continued
Once Stubby and I had finished eating we played cribbage, I wrote some notes, we read (if the light was good enough), and we listened to music. A POW named Smoky a western yodeler who imitated a well-known radio singer and whose popular ballad was "The Wabash Cannonball," rendered this selection time and again.
We had a trio who sang popular songs with a mixture of corn to the accompaniment of a comb and toilet paper. On Sunday nights there was a Methodist group who sang loudly. There was a hillbilly quartet whose favorite song was "How I'd Like to Hear My Mother Praying."
I called across the room to Leonardo, who was visiting his friends Cortez and Trez, "Coppola, ask them to sing 'Besame Mucho'!"
"Si, amigo," he answered, smiling.
I had firm command of ten words of Spanish. With Coppola and his Spanish-speaking friends it was noblesse oblige. We heard much singing in prison, but none was so wonderful as that of Trez and Cortez. They harmonized while seated at the table or lying in bed from opposite sides of the room. Their voices blended in romantic Spanish and Mexican ballads. They sang beautifully together and were, for me, the sole musical treat of barracks life.
At ten o'clock the guards turned off the lights. One POW was assigned every hour to fire duty. Usually he sat at a table under a single lightbulb covered with a tin can with both ends removed. For lack of anything to do or because they were tired or cold, most of the men were in their bunks by ten. A few stayed up to shoot craps, play cards, or just sit around the single light falling theatrically on the rough table. Gradually we all drifted off to bed, leaving the solitary guard. When called upon, Stubby, Coppola, and I pulled our guard turns one after the other.
By one o'clock I found the barracks still but not silent. It was a meditative time. It was hard to hold the mind in the barracks and on the life at hand. I wanted to move to fantasy: I wanted to go home.
During my hour stint I sometimes paced the length of the barracks. I walked from restlessness, to keep awake, and to keep in condition.
Once the weather became too severe to walk comfortably outside and if I missed the Munich detail for a few days, it seemed important to exercise.
In the semidarkness of the dim barracks deep in the night, there was a stillness broken by a multitude of human and nonhuman sounds. I was never unaware of the presence of 150 men, even if all were asleep. I, like every other man in the room, had spent hundreds of nights in rooms crowded with sleeping men and knew well the sounds of night sleepers. The difference in prison was in the physical condition of the barracks, the beds, and the men. In the prison barracks I could hear the slow, steady breathing of men. There were low vocal sounds of moaning coming from a man's deep dreams. Since I dreamed more in prison, I assumed others did. The actionless, frustrated, lonely life produced an active dream life. I heard scattered sounds of snoring and coughing; I heard the crackling of excelsior in the sacking, the squealing of wooden frames and taut wires. Hardly a full minute of absolute silence went by before a pair of heavy shoes hit the floor and a POW went clumping and scraping his long way to the latrine. The buckles on the combat boots jingled and clicked; leather was scraped across the soft wooden floors and sounded all the way to the exit. Now and then I heard a scratched match followed by a quick flame. Frequently there were articulated sounds: something between a sigh and a groan, a word would come forth clear and startling in the dark night. A full sentence was blurted out from a darkened corner of the barracks, almost magnetic in its insistence and clarity When the temperature dropped to zero, the effect on the kidneys brought men out of bed until the passing of POWs was like ants coming and going to a hill of sand. The lice, fleas, and bedbugs bit and scratched in the night, and men vigorously scratched them in their sleep or would suddenly awaken, sit up in their bunks, and in fury scratch their legs. All night long gas attacks, gas on the stomach, punctured the silence. I heard the swift scratching noise of a rat over the rough floor, a door slamming, and, in late winter, the fierce wind blowing against the thin walls, shaking the glass panes, rattling them.
One Sunday in December it was announced that all who wished could attend a performance of The Barrette of Win pole Street in the theatre building. At two o'clock one of the sergeants joined a German guard and took several of us through the compound to a barracks that contained a row of seats and a slightly raised curtained stage. Elizabeth Barrett and her sisters and female friends were all played by British prisoners of war. They were costumed in the Victorian period, and appropriate furniture included a chaise lounge of green velvet. The cast got a number of unintentional laughs from the mixed American, British, and French audience. Not all of the men were thoroughly convincing as females, but the actor playing Elizabeth Barrett was totally convincing. Who he was or whether he was, as rumor told, a well-known female impersonator made no difference. The situation was so characteristic of British adaptability, as well as needs, that it provided for me one of my memorable experiences in the theatre.
... to be continued
